In the world of sport, the genteel game of chess doesn’t cause a whole lot of headline injuries. However, when a Russian chess-playing robot became flustered during a match with a 7-year-old opponent who was playing rapidly, it reached out and snapped the youngster’s finger, breaking it, The Guardian reports.
The human player, one of the top youth chess competitors in Moscow, responded quickly after the machine had captured one of his pieces. Organizers and the manufacturer of the machine claim the boy acted too quickly after the robot’s move, which caused the machine to fail to reset. Or it could be that the vaunted machine was angry that the little pipsqueak was thinking faster than it was and resorted to traditional Russian way of handling upstarts: by breaking bones.